Do you remember the song? As I looked at this photo from a recent morning power walk, the song started playing in my head, and it hasn’t stopped. Does that ever happen to you? It happens to me often, especially if it’s a catchy tune with some repetitive lyrics.

I had a bit of a time with this photo in post processing. I was pleased to catch three stages of the flower in one photo – the unopened bud, the partially opened buds, and the fully opened flower. I was able to catch pretty good focus on each stage, But my dilemma was to now add some bokeh without blurring any of these stages too severely.

After adding a bit of the yellow colour depth in Snapseed (the original was washed out with bright sunlight), I remembered that I have an editing app called FOCOS. I took the photo into the app and just let it automatically add some depth of field. The app does the first adjustment automatically, and then the user has the option to do further manual adjustments. I did a couple of minor manual adjustments, in an attempt to get better focus on the dew drops on the open rose. Sometimes one can go too far with post processing. That’s why I usually save each edit as a copy and never overwrite the original.

“Her name was Emily Morgan, and she was the sweetest little rosebud that Texas ever knew. She was, in fact, the Yellow Rose of Texas. That song is not, as you may have thought, simply a celebration of a rather blah ideal of Lone Star womanhood. It is an homage to the accidental heroine of Texas independence.”

Texas Monthly